If you accept that life on earth is supposed to evolve into something stronger, then it follows that the weak, the useless and the self-destructive elements should die off.
Self-preservation is probably the most important ingredient for a Darwinian success story. I think it’s fair to say we all suck in that department.
With earth’s human population spreading like a virus (what is it now, 7 billion and doubling every 35 years?), evolution needs to kill off as many as possible. Fine with me. I’ll be doing my part to improve the rest of the planet by dying and not having any offspring.
Here’s the world population clock:
http://galen.metapath.org/popclk.html
I use it to remind myself why I need to get off this festering rock. Good luck, Darwin.
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I don’t think a value like “strong” is relevant to evolution, as there are many different criteria that organisms rely upon to survive on this planet. Some organisms have actually self-destructive behavior as a key component to their success, while others are inherently fragile (like orchids – how the fuck do they survive in the wild? It’s mind-boggling). There are even some creatures whose biological traits are so utterly absurd that it makes no sense how they could come to be – take, for instance, the peacock. Yes, that’s a great survival trait – make brilliant, huge plumage to catch the eyes of any nearby predators.
Strength (and therefor fortitude, constitution, and resolve) is “irrelevant” to evolution? LOL.
Brute strength obviously isn’t the only factor, but to say it is “irrelevant” in a world where animals savagely murder each other for their own survival (or in the case of humans, just because we’re ‘mad’), is patently absurd.
A “strong” (as in “more powerful than others”) animal is capable of carrying more things, resisting more pain, and more easily severely injuring its enemies/prey.
It is absolutely and quite obviously “relevant.”
Strength can be “outsmarted,” though i think the most important characteristic would be the Will to survive.
Peacocks are colorful because the females like the colors. The ones with the biggest and most vivid plumage have the most chance to reproduce, and the largest pool from which to select mates… and probably increased confidence, perhaps resulting in a stronger will to survive, than those less frequently chosen, less appealing iterations. Yeah, my feathers might get me eaten, but if all the ladies loved me before that happened, chances are i’ve already reproduced many times.
Also, @OP- i just think it’s a bit disingenuous to justify suicide with “doing the world more good by departing.”
Though there is definitely something to the “weak” ones dying off. Society selects the most desirable traits, and tends to shun anything dramatically different or incompatible. The problem is that most of the world bases their perceptions of reality on false beliefs… resulting in the most intelligent of us being shunned, unless we manage to integrate and become successful, and therefore, welcomed.
This is an incredibly complex topic, but it’s easy to understand through a clearer understanding of the nature of the universe, and particularly, this planet, and our species.
I think “gonna kill myself because there’s too many people” is not really a good reason… though i will admit, that “there’s too many people” reason has certainly caused me extensive frustration.
No, what I meant is it’s irrelevant as a stand-alone, generalized criteria upon which advancement of natural selection hinges. Speaking in terms of individual specimens within a species, however, it’s easy to draw the case that “weak” (those creatures whom retain juvenile features into adulthood) are almost universally preferred, granted there are no environmental pressures to select for other survival-oriented characteristics. There’s a video I really like on youtube that’s based in part on evolutionary-psychology, and it has this great tangent in the monologue that goes something like, “…creatures grow taller, and more childlike – thus, bald – which is why the Dodo, a member of the pigeon family, looks like an enormous pigeon hatchling. The same can be said for humans – we’re all big babies.”
Once environmental stressors are eliminated (as is the case in human civilization – heck, that’s the entire point of civilization), the taller and more childlike members of the race will take priority for breeding-status because there’s no reason to select for strength or resilience to an adverse environment anymore. So if the “weak ones” die off in human civilizations, we have only ourselves to blame for making this mockery of the natural order in the first place, and it has little to do with evolution or natural selection.
My best explanation that proves we need to die is the hayflick limit 🙂
This is a great topic, which is also difficult to discuss. It’s like trying to describe a whirlwind from the inside. We could be right next to each other and see a different picture, because we are quite deep in the Holocene mass extinction. The Dodo is one great example of the dozens of species that go extinct on a daily basis.
I agree that approaching peak population is one of many motivators in people’s suicidal ideation. It certainly is for me. I’m 41 I’ve had a good life but no kids either. The World3 online simulators show peak population at about 8.5 billion, with a die off to 3 billion by the year 2100. Along the way 25-50% of the species on Earth are expected to go extinct.
Coitus but species have been going extinct for millions of years. So by what has transpired in the past, you are right species will continue to go extinct. In time though more will evolve and be created probably :3 and and back to the hayflick limit our cells can only divide so many times before they die out and we begin to deteriorate. Cancer fucks with that and makes cells immortal continually allowing them to divide. Bad thing is these cells divide so much that they run out of the little excess DNA snippets that arw like tails so the cell starts eating itself to divide thus destroying its function and becoming rogue which is why cancer kills o: sorry got off topic point is we must die regardless of medical advancements and living conditions and any other factors that are calculated into life expectancy.
Superpower means empire. Within our species, most of us are in a cloud of hundreds of millions of assimilated psychophants, orbiting and enabling an imperial elite. We rob future generations of natural and economic wealth. The southern hemisphere supports us (not the other way around) and crowded developing countries are much better to the Earth than ours.
We USED the planet and overshot the carrying capacity of our planet by an order of magnitude by drawing down stored sunlight from the past, stored in fossil fuels. The average life expectancy will fall from the mid eighties today, to under 25 by the end of this century. Aside from these facts, my opinion is that someone will pop a nuke and that within days there will be more or less a full nuclear exchange.
People are able to shrug things off because they are in DENIAL. They are oblivious to the past, present and nearest future; to the thousands of generations and trillions of human descendants who will live brief tortured lives in the biologically impoverished world we’re leaving being. Even if everything was perfect except for a nuke plant exploding every 20 years, the Chernobyls and Fukashimas coming (alone) would be enough to gradually lower our numbers closer to 2 billion something closer to normal anyway.
I’m not sure about Hell in the afterlife, but any objectivity (at all) spent to glimpse at various futures within the next few decades reveals what looks to me like Hell on Earth.
People get frisky they want to stock up on water filters guns rice and beans. I don’t think survivors are going to be better off than those that die early. If my weakness is in not enjoying living in what will be (by far) the most terrifying chapter of human history, then so be it. I don’t blame anyone for this catastrophe and I sure as Hell don’t blame anyone for wanting an early checkout. ‘Cause this shitstorm will drag on for hundreds of years and it ain’t gonna be pretty. In a billion years the Sun will heat the Earth to the surface temp Venus has today, so there won’t be liquid water or life here anyway it’s not real this was always just a ride as Bill Hicks often explained.
I know “species have been going extinct for millions of years.” Why pretend to discuss when you just want to argue? The point is, that the big picture is horrific. This is not some conspiracy theory, Holocene’s what geologists actually call our time and what ecologists (Holocene mass extinction) call it too. Look it up maybe you’ll learn something.
I think it’s not so much the population itself that contributes to the suicidal ideation, as it is the value of a single human life contrasted to the enormity of a rapidly growing population. It’s too easy to lose oneself in the crowd, and social fragmentation is a very real, and very damaging sort of condition that arises from such a large, clustered population. Everyone is a stranger and the fabric of society is tattered in more places than just around the edges.
Contemplating the fate of humanity as the world spirals out of control, amidst all the injustices and atrocities… it’s infuriating and prohibitively complex. I think at some point, years ago, i reached a conclusion similar to: “okay we’re fucked. Now what?” And sort of stopped paying attention to the whole doom-thing, since i was so overwhelmed and obviously unable to fix any of it.
That’s why I look at things at a very local level – around me, in my environment, what is going wrong? How can I, in my own life, mitigate the wrong that I see? It’s tricky, but do-able. And even so, it’s not anywhere near perfect because it’s hard as hell to figure out what’s going wrong in the first place. 😛
This has become a very interesting discussion with insightful comments from all sides. I don’t know enough practical biology to comment on species at large, but speaking as a suicidal individual, I can point out my Darwinian flaws:
1) Refusal to procreate because I don’t want to subject any new lives to this Hell, not to mention decreased sex drive from depression so I highly doubt I’ll even have any accidents
2) General disregard for health
3) Opposing the greater majority of the human species, ensuring that my life is much more difficult than someone who embraces society
4) And of course the whole suicide thing, but that goes without saying.
I’m pretty sure some of these are genetic. The entire paternal side of my family is depressed and suicidal (no winners yet, I think I’ll be the first). And on the maternal side we have a bunch of rebels without a clue who get themselves killed or thrown in jail by their mid 20s. The result, me, is someone of colossally undesirable DNA. A Darwinian dead end.
I think the best way to look at the situation is not by analyzing species as a whole but by looking at weak individuals that die off. Mutations and such.
I remember a few years back there was a news story about a lion at a game preserve who refused to kill his food. Instead it adopted its prey (an oryx) as a pet. But in so doing, the lion began to starve. On a philosophical & poetic level, that lion was exceptional. But in terms of evolution, he was a mistake who probably didn’t live long. Sometimes I feel like we are all just that. I think in general suicidal people possess an exceptional “gift”, the ability to master their savage instinct for survival and instead use logic (or at least an attempt at logic) to determine their fate. I admire suicidal people, but nature probably despises us and wishes us gone.
I’ve always admired suicidal people too. Each time I think now THERE goes someone who kept it real. For me, it is not a “doom” thing to look at the big picture. What the future holds is a gradual return to normalcy, albeit normalcy in the big picture of human history.
Many many things will not make sense to a majority, because of outdated cultural stories that made perfect sense in the 70’s. Then it was Cheech and Chong perhaps. Now it’s more like Night of the Living Dead. Normal human population is well under 1 billion, with a life expectancy of the mid 30’s. Normal does not include cars electricity or even literacy for most people.
As peaks in supply, consumption, population and pollution come and go their collapses will be what we’re met with. It’s amazing to have been born in ’71 on an obvious upswing and to see things now, especially what lies open in front of us. People who are Amish (without electricity) and Indiginous hunter gathers (without agriculture, permanent shelters or written language) can and often are happier than us.
It’s not really doom but it will be a swift correction I think. Again I don’t blame anyone in particular, in fact I think things so far have been remarkably smooth in their steady decline. The Great Lakes don’t freeze anymore and no one seems to notice. The blizzard of ’77 could not be seen on radar because 95% of the snow was blown and swept off of (frozen) Lake Erie. It’s bizzare and a little lonely to live with people who don’t notice what’s happening. But many new parents my age are busy faking the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus to their children now, and well it just rolls along.
You are nature. I don’t despise those qualities, so I think it’s fair to say that at least some parts of nature actually like those traits (the noble mastery of savage instinct and the like). I appreciate those qualities for the same reason that I appreciate philanthropy when it’s done without concern for personal or social gain. It means the universe really isn’t that indifferent, after all.
Looking what’s happening to our earth and waking up to political realities, it is a challenge to find any reason to live when one’s personal life is a shambles anyway. Orange, I also do better when I stick to what’s local, tempted though I get to research all false flags and all things wrong with humanity and the so-called elite. I much prefer the indifference of the universe to the malevolence of humankind.
Interesting conversation. Thanks for launching it, Cyanides.